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Top Five: Social Networking Pet Peeves

When utilised properly, social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be incredible networking tools. However, lately I so often find myself typing out status updates or tweets then deleting them because I begin to think “who actually cares about this?”

When I was at university, I was constantly using Facebook and Twitter to plan my social life but as I grow older, I find myself using social networking sites for personal reasons less frequently. Even more so, if I want to communicate with my friends I find myself doing it privately through direct messages.

In the past, I’m sure I did many of these things that I see as an annoyance when I log onto my social networking sites – something I cringe thinking about now – but here are my top five social networking pet peeves:

The sole purpose of social networking websites is to be able to actually socialise online, so when people update their statuses with depressing ambiguous statements, usually relationship based, they should expect sympathy, right? I’m sure you can imagine the kind of scenario:

“Can’t believe I fell for it again!”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to talk about it”

I always find myself screaming at the computer screen “If you don’t want to talk about it, why are you putting it on your Facebook page”

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2. The Constant Updater

I have a few regular offenders of this one, especially on Facebook, where I’ll log on and will have to scroll down a few times until I get to a post by a new person. One day, I decided to count the amount of statuses one of my Facebook friends had updated in one day, it was 10. Most of them were complaining (see above) and very few generated discussion.

My initial thought was “surely if you’re going to update your status that often, you would go on Twitter” but I think that also goes against the essence of Twitter, but then I find it so much easier to press the ‘unfollow’ button than the ‘unfriend’ one.

Then there’s the tweeters who like to spam celebrities. As long as you avoid following people with band names/members/albums in their @ name, you should be safe.

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3. The ‘I think I’m famous’ updater

Yes, I’ve probably only seen this one once, but I think it’s the most shocking. When did we become a part of a culture where we feel so self-entitled we think everybody cares about our relationship? Most people dread the moment at the end of the relationship where their status changes on Facebook from “In a relationship” to “Single” but others apparently embrace the moment.

Once, I genuinely saw someone make a full blown statement on their status update that would probably be a step too far for a Hollywood couple divorcing after thirty years of marriage. I remember the phrase “we amicably split and no third parties were involved” being used. Is it really necessary? Does anyone other than your closest friends and family need to know the reasons for the split, or lack there of?

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4. The ‘non-consistent’ updater

I get so annoyed when people just update with what they think is most socially accepted online, especially when their opinions are inconsistent on different networking platforms. It often comes along with drastic weather, such as snow, so I’m bracing myself for these updates this weekend.

Along with snow, comes the two types of status updater – the lover and the mocker. Whilst some embrace the weather, taking photos of their surroundings, the others mock these people with updates including:

“Wow, don’t even need to look out the window, everyone is taking photos of snow”

“Never knew what snow was until I saw pictures of it on Facebook”

The thing that got me the last time it snowed though, was someone who I followed on Twitter and was friends with on Facebook was clearly just following the crowd. He was posting photos onto Twitter all day, yet mocking people who did the same thing on Facebook?

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5. The ‘I should have paid more attention in English’ updater

Users of social networking sites take note:

A Sentence Shouldn’t Look Like This – the first letter of each word does not need to be capitalised in the body of text.

‘Your’ and ‘You’re’ mean different things, so do ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’.

ALL CAPS SENTENCES ARE PRETTY HARD TO READ AND MAKE IT SEEM LIKE YOU ARE REALLY ANGRY!

Text speak is ridiculous, write in full sentences.

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As I’ve said, I’m sure I’ve done some of these in the past, but I think there are some things mentioned here just aren’t what social networking was made for. What grinds your gears when you log onto these social networking websites? Feel free to comment below.